Stories of the People and Places of 17th and 18th Century Acadia
“A river doesn’t climb back to its source; a man
doesn’t regain his lost youth; a people doesn’t change
the past. From the travails, the misfortunes, the ruins of
this past, a people can, however, draw useful lessons
for the present and the future.”
Welcome!
The region that was once called Acadia (Acadie in French) is probably most famous for the expulsion of its French-speaking inhabitants by the British over 265 years ago. In Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s romantic, yet in some ways foundational poem, Acadia is depicted as a near-paradise inhabited by “simple Acadian farmers” who were “free from/Fear, that reigns with the tyrant . . .”
Longfellow’s picture of a simple existence, without tyrants or fear, doesn’t reflect the realities of the people who inhabited 17th and 18th century Acadia. Nor does it give us a true picture of who they were, in all their glory and with all their flaws. His beautiful text is poetry, which is always part illusion.
History, by contrast, asks us to resist the temptation to “marbleize” our forebears. It invites us to see, and accept, their failures and biases, as well as their heroism, their strengths, their flashes of brilliance. History discourages us from thinking of people only in the aggregate — They were… They did…— and asks us to understand them as individuals, as well as members of a group.
If we take history’s lessons to heart, we understand that we can be brave in the face of adversity, because in the past ordinary people like us were brave. We learn that their opinions were sometimes ignorant and prejudiced and that, therefore, we might be prone to the same errors. Seeing how they persevered through suffering, we learn to endure.
We know from history that Acadia was not a paradise. It was largely an unforgiving wilderness, where survival depended on constant hard work. Much of the year was spent in preparation for winter, which could be long and harsh. Food was processed in kitchens and smokehouses, not by commercial conglomerates. For travel, people built their own boats, carts, and roads. There were epidemics and wild animals to contend with. Port cities like Louisbourg were subject to raids and siege warfare, but any settlement could be attacked, even in the absence of declared war.
Acadia was a turbulent place to live. Author Charles D. Mahaffie Jr. called it A Land of Discord Always. By the mid-18th century, the region lay within shouting—and shooting—distance of the British colonies. Whoever ruled Acadia could rule the continent. During 155 years of European conflict, France controlled it six times and Great Britain four, each bringing their misconceptions, prejudices, and diseases with them, and each contributing to endemic unrest.
18th century French map showing the peninsula of “Acadia or Nova Scotia” in relation
to French Canada and New England
Even before France and England clashed over the turf, French seigneurs (land grantees) waged battles amongst themselves. Amerindians fought each other from prehistoric times, and considering the terror that rained down on them when Europeans arrived, it’s hard to see Acadia as a paradise. I doubt any of its inhabitants thought of it that way, ever.
It’s doubtful they thought of themselves as simple either. Although they were mostly illiterate, Acadians were hardly ignorant. They may not have grasped everything they needed to know about the stormy geopolitics of the time, but they couldn’t help but understand European conflicts. That violence played out all around them, in the form of raids on their settlements, trading and travel bans, harassment of their priests, harassment by their priests, and battles waged against the forts in their midst.
Similarly, though they were patronized with labels like “children of the forest,” Amerindians of Acadia had complex cultures and traditions for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Their social structures, kinship lines, and religious practices were well established by Champlain’s time. Like the first French settlers, they were illiterate—not through ignorance, but because their languages were oral, not written. And like the Acadian settlers, they would become all too knowledgeable about the prejudices that sailed across the Atlantic on European ships.
As well as developing strategies to cope with political and racial discords, the people of Acadia had to understand the complex landscape they lived in. They had to know how to manage the ever-changing tidal rivers—how to travel on them, and how to keep them from flooding their crops. Today the dikes that Acadians built still protect rich farmland. If you get a chance to visit, you can walk along their broad tops for miles. (A windbreaker will come in handy.) For trade, for family reasons, for warfare, they had to navigate the swift, high tides of the Bay of Fundy (baie Franςaise to the Acadians). They had to venture into dense forests for timber, game, and overland travel.
Kitchen utensils, Port-Royal National Historic Site
Memorial cross marking one of many sites where Acadians were embarked on deportation ships in 1755, this one at Grand Pré
And they had to manage the more intimate landscape of the home, where women wove fabric for clothing and blankets from fibers they harvested themselves. Where they concocted medicines from plants grown in their kitchen gardens or gathered from the surrounding forest. Where cooking fires demanded constant attention. Where babies were born and families gathered.
So who were the people who inhabited this frontier landscape and influenced its foundation and future? That’s primarily what this site is about, to introduce some of those characters—the famous, and others not well known—who lived or impacted the Acadian way of life between 1604 and 1758.
We know that they were Amerindians who had been there for 10,000 years, primarily Mi’kmaq and Maliseet (Wolastoqiyik) in Nova Scotia and the area now known as New Brunswick. They were also French, British, Dutch, Scottish, Basque, and Europeans from other nations. They were New Englanders (Bastonnais, to the Acadians).
They were explorers, farmers, soldiers, fishermen, carpenters, missionaries, midwives, embezzlers, traders and trappers, storekeepers, blacksmiths, government functionaries, kings, nobles, slaves—yes, slaves!—scallywags and saints. Many of them, of course, were women.
And thousands claimed an identity they had forged for themselves, the Acadian identity. Over time, the Francophone settlers of Acadia came to think of themselves not as French when France claimed the territory, nor as British when Britain ruled there, but as a separate people belonging to the place they reclaimed from the tidewaters, and capable of determining their own destiny.
The New World had a way of working this transformation on the people who settled there. After all, it was only 21 years after the Acadian expulsions began in 1755 that another group of colonists declared a new identity for themselves, and created what became the United States of America.
Hopewell Rocks, aka The Flowerpots
History has left us a record of the people of Acadia. It’s tinged with the prejudices and sentiments of former times, which often resemble our own. Sadly, there are many gaps, where voices have been silenced, participants ignored, and stories lost.
Ancient Acadian Lives explores that record, and attempts to penetrate some of the silences, in hopes of teasing out an understanding of Acadia’s people. The characters are many and varied, and often surprising.
A second goal of this site is to convey a sense of place. Although Acadia’s exact boundaries were disputed and ill defined, the Acadian landscape was and is as interesting and varied as its people.
Today, vacationers can raft down some of its swift tidal rivers, which yesteryear’s inhabitants risked their lives to cross. They can see “reversing falls” on certain rivers, where the outflow meets the rush of the incoming tidal bore.
From the area around Minas Basin, visitors admire the proud, jutting Blomidon cliff (Cap Baptiste to the Acadians), which was a landmark for navigators in ancient times. And you wouldn’t want to miss the Hopewell Rocks, which the tides have eroded into fanciful shapes for millennia, and which the ancestors must have enjoyed.
By way of introduction . . .
I should say at the outset that I can’t claim the distinction of being Acadian, though I have both Acadian and Québecois ancestors on my father’s side. I was raised mostly in California, which has its own unique culture(s), and where I live today.
I became interested in Acadian history, and my connection to it, as a child living in upstate New York. One day, as my father helped me on with my snow boots, he talked about his childhood in Maine. He grew up there in the Acadian culture, and believed his family was Acadian. A genealogy done decades later showed that our surname is actually Québecois, via Normandy.
(Québec and Acadia, though they shared a French heritage, were culturally and economically quite different in the early days. Their colonists came from different parts of France, and for different reasons.)
Our first French Canadian ancestor arrived in Québec as a soldier in the late 1600s, and stayed as a settler after his service ended. The Acadian connection began in 1799, when two of his descendants married Acadian women on the same day at St. Basile, New Brunswick.
Later, when the border between the United States and Canada was finally set, my father’s branch of the family found themselves living not in New Brunswick, but in present-day Maine. They became U. S. citizens by a line inked on a map.
By the time I learned this, however, I was already hooked on Acadia. Over the years, I researched the history of the region for my own pleasure. I traveled to Eastern Canada several times to walk the historical landscape, talk with folks, delve into the various archives, and visit the excellent living history sites offered by Parks Canada.
If you visit the place that was once called Acadia, I think you’ll fall in love with it as I did. I’ll return from time to time to enjoy this beautiful region and continue my research. Maybe I’ll see you there!
Warm regards,
Christine Dufour
jacquerie09@gmail.com
@AcadianLives
